


Unmoored and Unmasked

by verushka70



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Anal, Angst and Porn, Brother/Brother Incest, Canon Compliant, Compulsion, Dildos, Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Consent, F/M, Het and Slash, M/M, Multi, Pegging, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-18 00:33:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10605585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verushka70/pseuds/verushka70
Summary: This new desire – disturbing, secret, deeply erotic – was that much more enticing. He kissed Katherine's neck just outside her bedroom. He wanted to go in – and didn't. He wanted her to do it to him again – no, he didn't.Yes: he did. He'd thought about it incessantly. Would never speak it aloud. Could never ask for it.~ ~ ~A small, secret part of Damon wants to weep that it is the detached, unfeeling Elena asking about it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This WIP sat around in my cloud space since at least 2011 or 2012. I dusted it off and added some finishing touches. **ETA** : Whoops, fixed an overzealous search/replace.

Damon had found it early on while lazily snooping among Elena’s things in her room for signs of the depth of Stefan’s infatuation. No one was home, not even Jeremy. Had he not snooped through other girls’ things – an old, ingrained habit with origins he avoided thinking about – he might have found the parallels disturbing.

But as different as they were, Katherine and Elena were hardly the only women in the world to supplement nature with man-made devices. It was an ancient impulse; various frescoes, pottery pieces, and vases could attest to that. Besides, as a lover of women, Damon had found similar objects among various women’s personal things over the century and a half that he’d been alive and traveling the world – stopping often in women’s beds.

He’d seen better – it wasn’t a very good or particularly sophisticated model: cheap, battery-operated, made in China. He turned the notched dial at the handle end to see if it would buzz to life, but the batteries were quite dead. Damon put the vibrator back in the bottom drawer of her dresser. It must not be getting much use anymore, what with Stefan –

That thought suddenly became an exquisite pang in his chest. Damon stilled and concentrated on it a moment, less with anger than with surprise – with wonder. Jealousy was not a new emotion where Stefan ( _Katherine_ , his mind whispered) was concerned – but this particular focus was. Damon shook his head to dismiss it. Elena was too much of too many things: too smitten with Stefan (with no knowledge of his past behavior…), too young, too wholesome, too inexperienced.

 _(But wouldn’t you love,_ a thought behind the pang pierced him, _to teach her?_ ) On the heels of that thought came a series of unbidden visions: Elena with him in happy, decadent bedroom scenes, inexplicably interspersed with hokey, wholesome images of her arm tucked in his, going to the movies, driving in his –)

– No, she was too damned goody-two-shoes, was what Elena was. Probably why “reformed” Stefan was with her.

Except she must not be completely fettered by “goodness,” Damon is strangely relieved to discover. She must have had – pre-Stefan – healthy age-appropriate lust along with the freedom of thought of twenty-first century girls and women. Damon figured “adolescent” (a word that wasn’t used when he actually was one) girls must have urges similar to their male counterparts, though it was the first time he’d considered that their intensity might equal – maybe even surpass? – those of boys. He adjusted his view of women accordingly and somewhat sympathetically, though none of the many things he’d learned about them over the last hundred and fifty-odd years had ever really helped him understand Katherine. That proved she must be exceptional.

Finding this vibrator among Elena’s things pricked Damon’s thoughts. He wondered who had bought it for her. She was underage, so she couldn’t have bought it herself. Even in this day and age, it wasn’t the kind of thing you would have someone else buy for you at her age unless it was a lover – who would also have to be old enough. Maybe she’d purchased it online, where no one would want to see identification (or question a fake one).

He filed this new information about Elena away. She would certainly not have used it the way Katherine sometimes had (would she?) It wouldn’t have occurred to her, he thought. Something else Damon could have showed her, if he were in Stefan’s place. Stefan certainly wouldn’t (would he)?

Damon didn’t like the term “toy.” Toys were for children. When he became a soldier he gave up childish things. He returned a young man Katherine saw fit to tutor in a much different way. There should be a better term, something that indicated the maturity – sexual and otherwise – required to obtain and use such things. Childhood receded, growing ever distant as one moved through manhood (womanhood, whatever), fading faster and faster the more one engaged in intimate relations, until it was a distant memory. It was not a place you could ever revisit (and who would want to?).

Elena’s… tool – an inelegant but not childish term – made Damon think of Katherine. He had forgotten about significant aspects of hers and it’s use until he’d been turned – when everything he’d been compelled to forget began to come back. But he had never forgotten that it existed.

Damon occasionally wondered about the arbitrary nature of what Katherine had compelled, versus what she wanted him to remember. The pattern was indecipherable.

* * *

It had been among Katherine's things. It felt like smoothly polished antler or bone but seemed too thick to be either. It had hints of anatomical correctness. The “head” was tapered; two shallow, carved parallel lines, one slightly deeper than the other, encircled the phallus about an inch and a half from the tip. They ran almost all the way around it; in the half inch gap where the parallel lines delineating the “head” failed to meet, there was an inverted V-like notch lightly carved into the underside.

He sniffed it, trying to find a hint of her scent on it. It was quite faint – or was it wishful thinking that he caught the barest whiff of Katherine’s sex? Damon put it back.

But the next time he went through her things for notes or tokens from Stefan, he checked for it where he'd originally found it, among her undergarments. It was still there. He put it back again. He'd checked on it a few more times during jealous searches. If it wasn't with her undergarments, it was with her handkerchiefs.

One day he absently held it while he pawed through her other things with his other hand. He hadn't heard her approach. The door opened and she stepped into the room.

Caught red-handed, Damon blushed to the roots of his hair, still the utterly human young man she would soon change.

Katherine didn't blush at all. She paused in the doorway, then strode across the room to him, skirts and petticoats rustling. She took it away from him with one hand. Her other gloved hand slapped him, hard.

Damon’s head whipped to one side; he was already stuttering an apology. “I'm sorry, Miss K-”

“Are you, Damon?” she asked, putting it back in the drawer.

“I am, I wasn't looking for that–”

“But you found it,” she said, and grabbed his chin. “Would you like to know what it's for?” she added, her tone suddenly silky.

He put a hand on his cheek where she'd slapped him. It felt hot. He didn't need to look in the mirror to know he'd have a red mark.

“No, I–”

“But of course you do,” she spoke loudly over him.

She grabbed Damon by the lapels of his waist coat and shoved him towards the bed. He stumbled but remained upright. But Katherine was very strong and he was very chastened. She grabbed him again and threw him on the bed. She leaned over and forcibly rolled him onto his stomach, then laid down on the length of his body.

“You think it was for me?” she questioned.

“I – I supposed it must be,” he admitted.

She slid to the side of him, and ran a gloved hand down his back. Her hand continued over his buttock.

“It’s a whalebone antiquity. My corsets are made of whalebone as well,” she mused. “Men of ancient, far north tribes carved them for their women. They might be gone days, weeks – even months at a time – hunting whales or seals.” She stroked down Damon's back again, from his collar down to the clothed furrow between his buttocks again. “They left them behind for their women, so they would be satisfied and not seek companionship elsewhere.”

“But you said it wasn't for you,” Damon questioned quietly.

“I never said that,” she smirked. “It's for anyone I want... once I decide he's worthy.”

“He?” he breathed. He'd seen things among the soldiers and the whores who were never far from the front, but nothing quite like what she described. Those things combined with images he didn't want to picture, but couldn't help.

“Men do it to other men,” she pointed out. “This lets a woman do it to a man. To you.”

Damon gulped under her repeated strokes. He hardened against his will.

“Miss K-Katherine, I have to–”

“You have to stop looking through my things, Damon,” she said.

“I just wanted to know more about you.”

“Looking for letters from Stefan had nothing to do with it?” Katherine’s voice was silky again.

“Well, yes – but I–”

She stood abruptly and hauled him up as well. “It's a sign of very poor manners, Damon, to look through a house guest's things.” Her voice was quiet and gentle, but her hand held his chin tightly.

“I'm very sorry, Miss Katherine.”

She took her hand from his chin, only to slap him, hard, once again. “You certainly are sorry, aren't you?” she said.

She grabbed his chin again and kissed him, hard. Her tongue pressed between his teeth, pushing the roof of his mouth. His dwindling erection was hard again in an instant.

“So sorry,” he moaned into her mouth as she kissed him.

Her tongue was gone before he could capture it. When she pushed him away and sat down at her vanity, he knew he was dismissed.

“Don't do that again, Damon,” she said. He met her eyes in her mirror. “I won't,” he lied.

* * *

The next time she caught him going through her things, Katherine had Stefan with her. She compelled Damon to obey and compelled Stefan to sit and watch. She had Damon bend over the side of the bed and lower his trousers and underpants.

Katherine used the whalebone phallus on him with nothing, not even goose grease. Just shoved it in him, dry, again and again. He cried out in pain and humiliation, looking away from his younger brother's somber, glazed stare.

The humiliation and pain turned into something else. The invasion, the pressure and rhythm became strangely pleasurable, beneath the pain of feeling split apart. Damon found himself moving with her motion as Katherine pushed and pulled it in and out of him. His face burned as he realized what he was doing – Stefan must see it too – but he couldn't stop.

He convulsed and spurted all over the coverlet, clenching around the phallus, twitching with aftershocks before she yanked it cruelly out of him and folded it into an open handkerchief for the maid to clean later. Then she pulled Damon up from the bed and slapped his face hard, twice, reddening both his cheeks.

“That,” she told them both, “is what happens when you disobey. Now leave us,” she ordered Damon.

She turned to Stefan, whose arousal was visible through his trousers. He looked paler than usual. He had eyes only for her as she sank into his lap, sliding her mouth across his. Katherine eyed Damon as Stefan closed his eyes and kissed her neck. Damon quickly pulled his trousers up and fled.

* * *

Damon was sore back there for several days; if he sat wrong it reminded him of what happened – as if he could have forgotten if he tried. Visits to the water-closet were excruciating.

He avoided Katherine – and Stefan – until he’d healed, until he no longer had to be careful how he sat at the dinner table. But he walked around perpetually half hard, the experience indelible, imprinted on his brain and the backs of his eyelids whenever he closed them, as if he’d been outside himself watching it happen to someone else – as if he'd been Stefan sitting across the room, watching.

Alone in bed each night, Damon tossed and turned restlessly, haunted and aroused by the memory. He tried to resist, but most nights he eventually gave up and stroked himself to the memory of Katherine sodomizing him. With those thoughts, ejaculation quickly erupted from him and he spurted into a handkerchief.

He drifted easily into decadent thoughts of it while contemplating the utter rubbish of Father’s world. Her exotic punishment for his snooping began to obsessively obliterate all thoughts of what Damon wished to leave behind anyway; became a harbinger of all that had been kept from him, all that he’d never been told and never would be – it was symbolic of all that the Founders and their wives would _never_ know, but which Katherine could show him.

* * *

The next time Katherine allowed Damon to walk her to her bedroom door after a walk around the orchards – without Stefan – he shivered with a desire he didn't want to have. He paused at the threshold, lips hovering above her gloved hand.

Part of him wanted everything normal – Katherine his, not Stefan’s; totally normal relations with her. The idea of marrying her was a not entirely distasteful shadow in the back of his mind: Katherine was definitely not the frivolous, conformist wilting flowers so many Elders, his father included, seemed to want to match with him. The idea of making Katherine his and his _alone_ (as if she would ever allow any man to own her) was appealing.

But a growing part of Damon ate up all that Katherine had shown him so far, even when it frightened or repulsed him. She confirmed his belief that there was more to life than the yoke and harness Father and Mystic Falls expected (demanded). In their dying world, what could not be physically coerced was socially enforced. He had seen some of the world by now. He'd been disinclined to believe what he was told even as a child, always suspecting an ulterior motive to the manners and propriety that stifled him – to all that was for his “own good.” He'd learned a few things and Katherine taught him more every day, taught him to _question_.

His time as a soldier had taught Damon to doubt manner, conventions, propriety as everyone around him (with the possible exception of Stefan) lived blithely ignorant of the falsehoods on which their lives depended, the brutality by which they were defended – the hypocrisy of the Founders and which they forced on their sons knowingly, as they willingly risked their sons’ death and dismemberment for it.

This strange new desire that made Damon quiver as he pressed his lips to Katherine’s gloved knuckles was only part of him growing away from the life he’d known before, one which he was increasingly eager to lose. Katherine possessed secrets he needed to know. He – and, all right, Stefan, too – was destined for bigger, better things than Mystic Falls. The rules didn't apply to them, though Stefan still made an effort to follow them. The sooner they made their escape, the better; Damon felt guilty that it would be he and Katherine alone. But they could send for his little brother later, once they had established a place somewhere else. The West, Damon thought.

This new desire – disturbing, secret, deeply erotic – only made it that much more enticing. He kissed Katherine's neck in the hall just outside her bedroom. He wanted to go through the door – and didn't. He wanted her to do it to him again – no, he didn't.

Yes: he did. He'd thought about it incessantly. Would never speak it aloud. Could never ask for it.

She silently pulled him into her bedroom and closed the door behind them. He was up against her, then, at the door – caressed her through her dress, tugging at the top of her corset, touching and trying to free her breasts. Katherine pushed him an arm's length away, one eyebrow and one corner of her mouth lifting. Her dark gaze bored into Damon; he felt she could read everything in him, know his thoughts without him speaking. It was frightening – and exhilarating, freeing.

She moved forward against him, pushing him back. He stepped backwards with her, until they were chest to chest alongside her vanity.

Damon’s hand on Katherine’s hip slid over the curve of her rear, caressing it through the wires of her hoop skirt and stiff, rustling petticoats. With his other hand, he dragged her hand to his own backside. Tried to show her.

She leaned sideways slightly and her long, lithe arm opened wide the drawer of her vanity. Her eyes never leaving his, her chin angled to gesture at the drawer's contents, watching him closely.

Damon looked over. The whalebone phallus gleamed, nestled in among kerchiefs and stockings. He couldn't control his trembling, then, though he felt frozen to the spot. She pulled it from the drawer and extricated herself from his arms. She picked up a jar from the vanity. Face cream. His breath came shallow and fast, suddenly.

Katherine set both objects on the bed, then turned her back to him. The lift of her chin over her shoulder unmistakably ordered Damon to divest her of her dress. His hands shook as he undid the many tiny clasps. Her dress and then the hoop skirt came away from her body. He lifted them over her head, tossed them at the foot of the bed.

Katherine turned in her corset and petticoats. “Let's not waste time on my corset.” Her voice was quiet, calm and firm. “Keep your undershirt on.”

Damon understood that he was to remove everything else. He tried controlling the tremble of his hands as he stripped out of everything but his undershirt, but eventually gave up. Katherine was, he hoped, too busy doing the same to notice.

They finally faced each other, both naked from the waist down. He was already hard, hands clenched into fists at his thighs to control their shaking. She picked up the whalebone phallus and the jar of face cream.

“Get on the bed, on your hands and knees,” she said softly. Yet it was a command.

Damon obediently moved onto the bed, on all fours. Katherine moved onto the bed behind him. Her clever fingers stroked the sensitive skin between his balls and his opening. A sudden overwhelming sense of the untold things she knew – and could teach him – set Damon trembling anew. Then there was cold wetness at his opening, and he flinched.

“Don't hold your breath,” Katherine whispered.

Wise advice. Surprisingly difficult to follow. This time she didn't hurt him (much). She went slow and gentle, starting with just the tip. She took her time, working the tip in and out, then gradually the entire head. Pain commingled with, was overcome by, aching, twisting pleasure.

By the time Katherine had opened Damon up enough to accept the full thickness of the shaft, his chest heaved silently against the coverlet; his teeth were in his own forearm. His other hand crept to stroke his swollen, throbbing cock.

“Don't,” Katherine warned. “I'll touch you.”

Her other hand ghosted over his balls, then grasped his shaft and squeezed. He lurched, clenching around the phallus in his backside, nearly coming. Her fierce squeeze of the head forced him back from the edge – just. His thigh muscles shivered as his arousal receded slightly.

Katherine began again: loose, slow, gentle strokes of Damon’s cock, matching them to the rhythm of the phallus she moved in and out of him. His arousal climbed again until he was moving back to meet her stroke for stroke, his thighs parting wide for the growing speed and strength of her strokes. At the last moment – him again at the edge, poised to fall into the abandon she offered – she pulled the phallus completely out of him and dropped his cock. He lurched backward slightly, his body taking a moment to catch up to the sudden loss of sensation.

“Katherine,” Damon gasped. “Please–” Reduced to begging.

“Roll over,” she ordered in a fierce whisper.

He did as he was told and laid on his back, his hand going reflexively to his cock. But it wasn't enough, not now.

“No,” Katherine forbid him.

She pressed the phallus into the hand that he'd just had on his cock, and straddled him. She sank down on him in one fluid motion – hot, tight, shockingly wet – but she didn’t move further. Damon’s arousal climbed sharply, banked just below the threshold. His other hand went to her hip. He looked from her to the phallus in his hand, and back, mind blank.

She propped her hands on his chest then and ground on him once, clenching tightly around his cock. Despite the loss of previous sensation, his arousal simmered.

“Do it to yourself,” she whispered, her eyes slitted with desire.

Damon wasn't sure he heard right. “What?”

“Do it.” Her whisper was fierce.

It was one thing for her to do it to him. It was entirely another for him to do it to himself. She clenched herself tightly around his cock, twisting his arousal higher. Not high enough. Damon turned his face away and lifted his hips. She rose with him, staying on his cock. He brought the phallus into position between his buttocks.

“Look at me,” she hissed.

He unwillingly faced forward and raised his eyes to hers.

“Put it in you,” she whispered. “Deep.”

He penetrated himself as she ordered, his muscles clenched involuntarily around the renewed penetration. Those muscles made his cock twitch inside her. Back inside him, the phallus pushed him closer to the edge.

A tear escaped the corner of Damon’s eye at his helplessness in the face of this obsession with her, with this. He had never felt so naked, so deeply unmasked. For an instant he hated her for it.

“Keep it there,” she ordered him quietly.

Damon lowered his trembling hips, holding the phallus in place deep inside him, wrist twisted uncomfortably under his own buttocks.

Katherine settled back on him and began moving again. The strength of her rocking on him, grinding back and forth, moved them both. Though Damon held it still, her motion moved Damon's hips, moving the phallus in and out of him. Rocking slightly back and forth on it with Katherine's motion forced Damon’s arousal closer to the edge he'd been riding before.

She'd seen everything else. He'd be damned if she would take this, too.

He clenched tight around the phallus and defiantly bucked up into her hard, again and again. Tightening and thrusting moved the phallus inside him even more.

Katherine gasped in protest as he fucked up into her, but it was too late. The inevitability rose in Damon, beyond control this time.

He spasmed and spurted, again and again, his involuntary clenching around the whalebone phallus prolonging and intensifying his final pleasure. He couldn't contain the guttural groan that burst from his lips, couldn't be bothered to care who heard, gasped as he clenched and spurted seemingly endlessly.

Katherine slapped him then, but even that couldn't bring him down to earth. Damon felt it from a distance, in a state of bliss. Or maybe she slapped him for her own pleasure; she was soon moaning and shaking above him, too.

In this blissful detachment, he felt Katherine sink down on him and kiss his chest through his undershirt. She slid to the side, her forearm slipping between his thighs. Her hand closed over his, still holding the end of the phallus. Using his hand, she pulled it slowly out of him. He shook again with aftershocks and let go of it, his cock hardening again already. He rolled over on Katherine and imprisoned her wrists at her side.

“Damon,” she protested, trying to break free.

He knew she could; she was stronger than him. But he held her wrists, tighter and harder than ever before, pressing his hard cock against her thigh.

“Shut your mouth,” Damon muttered. He slid his legs between hers, poking his erection farther back, past the wet, hot hole he’d just been in, seeking the one she’d never given him. It wasn't necessary to say but he said it anyway. “You have everything, now, all of me – inside and out.” There was a slight bitterness on his tongue. “Give me this.”

He shoved his cock at her tightest hole again. Her expression shifted from surprise to a decadent lift of one eyebrow and one corner of her mouth. She drew her knees up high alongside him and helpfully lifted her hips.

Damon thrust brutally. The tip went in, but she was tight like a vise and dry. She gritted her teeth through her smile and he thrust harder, deeper. Her eyes shut tight and she bit her lip, groaning. He worked his way in quickly, the heat and tight constriction and her strange surrender rapidly increasing his arousal. He still held her wrists tight; the phallus rolled around underneath them, knocking into his knees.

Her breasts were half out of her corset. He took the edge into his teeth and pulled it down sharply, spilling them out completely. Damon sucked her nipples hard, first the right, then the left, and then buried his face between them and fucked her ass as hard and as fast as he could. She relaxed within the stiff stays of her corset, chest heaving under the press of his forehead.

Damon inhaled his own hot, moist breath against the soft skin between Katherine’s breasts as he reached a crescendo. Katherine moaned softly under him as he spilled his seed in her ass. Damon twitched and lurched, the pleasure of this climax almost painful so soon after the previous.

When he was fully spent, he collapsed on her, his face tucked against her neck. Damon loosened his grip on her wrists. Her hands slid up his arms gently; the fingers of one hand stroked through the hair above the back of his neck.

Katherine suddenly grabbed Damon by his hair and lifted his head roughly.

They looked at each other. Katherine’s enigmatic expression revealed nothing. Damon hoped his did the same.

After a long moment staring at each other, Katherine let his head back down and tucked his face against her neck once more.

Sleep pulled at the edge of his mind while his breathing slowed.

His last thoughts before he fell asleep were that Katherine's strength meant she could hold up to the most vigorous of physical relations – and that he should test this idea as soon as possible.

* * *

Looking back, Damon thinks this is when he came unmoored within himself and anchored to Katherine instead. Personality and experiences had already cleaved him from normal expectations. What little certainty he'd had was slowly chipped away until, like a sculptor, Katherine freed him from the rock that had imprisoned him.

It had been a mistake to define himself by loving her, and – soon after – by hating Stefan. But Damon didn't understand that mistake for what it was, for a hundred and fifty-odd years.

Compartmentalizing did that sometimes.

* * *

The next time Damon came to Katherine’s room, Stefan was already in her bed. Though his heart rebelled at the thought, desire and arousal had other ideas. Damon had thought she meant them to share her, but she had other plans. Like Stefan climbing behind him while he was inside her.

“You're already used to it, Damon,” Katherine whispered beneath him, her hair pooled around her head like blood in the dark. The lift of her lip was almost contemptuous as Stefan nudged at his backside.

Damon sighed and laid completely on her. He spread his legs for his brother as Stefan pushed the tip of his cock in. Damon stopped moving, then; he let Stefan work his way in, slowly but surely. Felt his own cock soften slightly, then stiffen up even harder. Stefan's weight and thrusts moved Damon inside Katherine shallowly. She stroked Damon’s shoulders briefly, reaching past his to stroke Stefan's. Once Stefan was all the way in, Damon resumed moving. Stefan mostly remained still, holding himself up over them both.

He didn't have to do much; Damon moved between them. Each in-out thrust into Katherine pulled and pushed Stefan’s cock inside him, again and again, until Damon became frenzied and the rhythm started to break down. Behind him, Stefan moaned; Katherine moaned beneath him. Damon felt like a puppet dancing on strings between them until orgasm shattered him.

Even in the midst of this hard-won oblivion he could not forget either of them for an instant. Katherine’s sex convulsed around him as his own spurts came farther apart, and Stefan’s brutal thrusts into him jerked further spurts and twitches from Damon and Katherine beneath him.

Damon collapsed down onto Katherine, and Stefan did the same onto him. There was no sound but the harsh, asynchronous breathing of the three of them. Then Damon squirmed between them, feeling suddenly suffocated, almost panicky. Stefan pulled out of him, making Damon shudder. He slid sideways off Damon and then Damon slipped his softening cock out of Katherine and sank down on her other side, exhausted.

* * *

Damon realized later, after he turned, that he was compelled then. Stefan probably was, too. It didn't stop him from holding it against Stefan – or Katherine. Or himself.

So began a lifelong habit he many times quit but to which he always inevitably returned. From the time Katherine “died” Damon often did it with paid professionals, always brunettes with dark eyes, their detached service and female bodies a blank canvas for memories.

But best of all was the happenstance woman who looked slightly like Katherine but was nothing like her. Since he could care less what they thought, if they were repulsed and tried to kick him out, he just compelled them. But if they were intrigued or curious and aroused, he didn’t, and talked them through it.

Not that he didn’t avail himself of men; he did. That was great too. But it wasn’t the same. Damon needed the softness of breasts crushed against him, smooth female skin, higher pitched moans.

He liked to think that, for all his old-fashioned ways, he’d personally empowered many women over the last century, nearly half of them during the Jazz Age, and several during the Second World War, when men were harder to come by.

He kept the whalebone phallus for when Katherine was freed of the tomb when the comet returned. It was who-knew-how-old when she got it. What was another hundred and fifty or so years?

Then he met Elena, Katherine's spitting image and her diametrical opposite.

* * *

Damon was intrigued by Elena, but not swayed. She was but a pale shadow of Katherine, a trick of genetics – nothing more. He let Stefan have her, certain his beloved Katherine waited for resurrection in the tomb beneath Fell's Church. He kept her whalebone phallus hidden under a loose floorboard in the boarding house.

Katherine wasn't in the tomb.

He was half-crazed with betrayal when Katherine finally turned up. But of course it wasn’t Damon she sought when she got back to Mystic Falls.

Damon removed the phallus from under the loose floorboard. He wanted to destroy its bitter reminder of his stupidity and vulnerability to an unworthy woman.

But somehow he couldn’t quite make himself. He put it in a drawer, behind socks and underwear. Checked it periodically, just making sure it was still there, ambivalent about what to do with it.

Back in the day, he could never bring himself to actually ask Katherine to use it; he usually resorted to just handing it to her when that was what he wanted. And that was with _Katherine_.

Elena – who is not unworthy – will never know of it, Damon decided. That was a closed chapter.

But if she miraculously thought of it herself – which she might never – only then might Damon… but, no. The mere thought was ridiculous.

Wasn’t it?

But Elena ends up neither mortal nor alive, thanks to Stefan.

* * *

He comes home from another Sheriff Forbes bad news update to find Elena going through his closet. His dresser drawers are partially open, clothes strewn here and there. She doesn't bother to hide what she’s doing, doesn’t feign guilt.

“Looking for something in particular?” he says neutrally, as if it doesn't bother him in the slightest.

“I found this. I wondered if there was anything else,” she says.

She turns to him with Katherine's whalebone phallus in her hand. Some perverse gentlemanly streak surfaces, not to kiss and tell. Old habits, perhaps. Damon has merely irritated defiance for this emotionless Elena.

“No, there's nothing 'else',” he snorts.

“Well, whose is it?” she asks.

He shrugs. “It's mine.”

One of her perfect eyebrows lifts. “It's yours?”

“I got it from a friend a long time ago,” Damon says vaguely. He smiles, not at all nicely.

“Katherine?” she guesses, expressionless. “Did she use it on you, or you on her? Or did both of you take turns on each other?”

“You know, just because your emotions are off, doesn't mean you have to turn off class and manners, too,” Damon sighs.

She shrugs and her shoulder moves a long lock of her dark hair. “They aren't. I just don't care what people think about anything I say or do.”

“Obviously,” Damon replies. Suddenly he can't stand the idea that this cool, careless Elena thinks she knows so much about him.

“Give me that.” He takes it from her and turns away. “What makes you think it was a 'she'? Could've been a 'he'.” Distraction; change the subject.

“Why would two men need it?” she says blankly. “You both already have the right equipment.”

“Mysteries of the world even you don’t understand,” Damon answers. He doesn't quite know why he bothers. He tucks the whalebone phallus back into his underwear drawer and shuts it.

Suddenly Elena is there behind him, vampire-swift. She shoves Damon’s chest roughly into his dresser, shutting some of the open drawers inadvertently. Elena holds him up against his dresser. He lets her. Her leg parts his thighs from behind. Damon’s physical response is mechanical and melancholy. His cock throbs to life against the wooden drawer.

He will take Elena any way he gets her – or he _would_ have. But _this_ he never really expected – certainly not this soon, and not like this. He might have fantasized that he could lead her around to it, eventually, if everything else fell into place first (a big “if,” but his wait for Katherine means Damon is nothing if not patient). But the reality was safely out of reach while Elena was human – even after she admitted feelings for him, there was always Stefan. Once Elena became a vampire, Damon figured he had slightly better odds; time and life as a vampire could expand her horizons. But if it ever came to pass, how would he know whether she did it because she truly wanted to do it, or because of the sire bond?

It was excruciatingly important that it be her idea. So he had never shown her the phallus, had kept it hidden. Damon knew human Elena to be an honorable, privacy-respecting girl. Her transformation into a vampire hadn’t changed that; he knew she would help herself to their many books in the library, but never go through his things.

Now with her humanity turned off, she does what she wants conscience-free, and compartmentalizes just like Damon did for decades. That irony is just the icing on the cake. The day has finally come through no effort on his part: the idea has occurred to her, all on her own. He lets her press her breasts to his back, lets her push her leg farther between his and spread them apart. He doesn't want this – not with her like she is – but he lets her. 

He can deny her almost nothing, it seems, a frighteningly familiar feeling. A small, secret part of Damon wants to weep that the Elena asking if she can use Katherine’s whalebone phallus on him is this cool, detached, unfeeling Elena, for whom it means nothing.

She slides a hand around his hip and feels his erection. “So is this what you want?” she murmurs.

“No,” Damon sighs.

She backs off slightly. “But you said it was yours.”

“It is.” He shrugs.

“You’re hard, though.” Elena’s voice is flat, matter-of-fact. She steps completely away and Damon is about to relax. But then she grabs his shoulder, turns him roughly to face her, and shoves him back up against his dresser.

“Yeah.” He shrugs again.

“So why don't you want it?”

“Elena,” he begins, then falls silent, the weight and history too much to explain to this switched-off version of Elena.

“Does Stefan have to be around for it? Is that it?” she asks coolly.

He wants to slap that hollow, disinterested expression off her face. If she doesn’t care, why does she ask?

“No, I just – not with you. Not today. Maybe not ever.” Damon slips out of her grasp.

“It's not like I would permanently damage you, even if I did it wrong,” Elena points out helpfully.

“That is _so_ not even part of why.” He pushes past her, lips thin with impatience.

“Then why?” She dashes into his path, vampire-swift.

“Let it go,” he says disgustedly. Elena is like a dog with a bone, with her humanity off.

“What if I make it happen?” she says, less stubborn than implacable. In this she is like Katherine. It’s a depressing realization.

Damon looks her in the eye. He pauses quite long, gives her time to really think about what she just said. She arches an eyebrow at him, but says nothing.

“Not. Going. To. Happen,” he enunciates clearly. “Don't even try, or you'll be one very sorry newbie vampire.”

“Maybe I'll try it on Stefan,” Elena says flatly. But it’s a taunt to get a rise out of him.

Damon laughs bitterly. “Knock yourself out. He's even less likely.”

“Why?” she asks. “'Cause he's less of a bitch than you now?”

Damon shoves past her. “Go ahead and try it. Just don't say I didn't warn you.”

He hopes his tone is malicious and final, instead of the sad combination of crushed and excited that bloomed inside him over the course of this conversation.

This must be payback or karma, that the universe would suddenly align the stars to give him exactly what he wanted, exactly the way he never wanted it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta-ed; all mistakes mine. LMK if you're interested in beta-ing. I mostly write in other fandoms and don't have a beta for this one.


End file.
